Vancouver accountant weighs in on how federal strike will affect taxpayers

A Vancouver-based accountant says business has been busy and his clients have been stressed after a tax season-affecting strike started early Wednesday morning.

That strike being conducted by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC), which represents 35,000 Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) employees, among other federal workers.

With Canada’s tax deadline just two weeks away, Marvin Wendall says there has been a sense of urgency among those he’s dealing with, as people are concerned about when they’re going to get the tax returns they’ve been expecting all year.

“People are expecting refunds and they know they’re not going to get them, and they kind of depend on them.”

“So the realization is that the strike is protracted who knows when they’re gonna get their money back and a lot of people depend on it. They depend on their refund,” he said.

That sense of urgency Wendall notes has been ramped up for a while. He believes that’s because this is a strike people may have known was coming.

And, although he notes it is early in tax season, the majority of his clients have filed but not gotten their refund.

Related articles:

• 155,000 federal public workers to strike Wednesday morning

• Federal workers now on strike: services that may be affected

• No deal at union deadline; federal workers hit the picket lines as talks continue

Wendall adds he believes CRA has used some serious “gamesmanship” in anticipation of this strike as well, by slowing the tax return process down “somewhat deliberately.”

“It’s just to put pressure on the government,” he said. “They’re going to use whatever leverage they have to force the government’s hand, and taxpayers are going to start to get angry and start vocalizing their problems so the government’s caught between CRA and the taxpayer.”

“If you’ve got a million taxpayers that don’t have their refunds, they’re going to be barking, they’re not going to be happy.”

If you haven’t filed your taxes just yet, Wendall recommends getting it done and sent off electronically before the April 30 tax deadline, which the CRA has stressed it will not be extending.

As of Wednesday afternoon, PSAC and the federal government were still at the bargaining table.

-With files from James Paracy